> Is there any creed that suggests that namespace decelerations are
> either bad or shunned upon? It seems that 3 letter namespaces are the
> norm. Is anyone using verbose namespace declarations regularly?
>
> Karl..
>
>
I presume you mean "declarations" :)

You appear to be confusing the namespace URI or name with its prefix. The
idea is that namespace URIs are globally unique, they are often similar to
URLs because that way you can use your domain and assure uniqueness,
although there's nothing to stop you creating a namespace such as
http://www.microsoft.com if you wish, it's a "gentlemen's agreement".
The prefix is a way to save writing the long URI and just holds for the
lifetime of the document, maybe even less than that if you re-define the
prefix mappings. So you can say that "ns" actually represents
http:///www.myDomain.com/namespaces/myNamespace and use that prefix in a
number of situations, e.g.. in an XPath expression. You often this mapping
with xmlns:ns="http:///www.myDomain.com/namespaces/myNamespace&quot; but this
only holds until the URI is mapped to a different prefix or the process
finishes. So in an XML document you could map "ns1" to the URI whereas in an
XSLT you use to transform it you could map to "ns2" instead.